Dec302008

Citrix Project Apollo: Remoting Aero, DirectX, and OpenGL via ICA

It’s been over a year since Citrix first demoed “Project Apollo,” their solution for remoting Vista Aero glass to clients. Displaying Vista Aero glass over a remote display protocol like ICA or RDP is complex, because Aero requires a GPU to render the complex graphics. (It’s not as simple as just enabling the “themes” service like when you wanted to add the Windows XP Luna experience to a Windows 2003 Terminal Server.) This is essentially impossible in a multi-user Terminal Server enviroment, since each session would require its own GPU. (Sure, maybe you could pop a graphics card into your server, but best case that’d just give you Aero in a single session–and that’s assuming that you had a remote display protocol that could support it.) Microsoft is rumored to be working on an Aero remoting solution for Terminal Services based on the Calista technology they acquired earlier this year, but so far nothing official has been announced.

Deepak Gupta is a IT & Web Consultant. He is the founder and CEO of diTii.com & DIT Technologies, where he's engaged in providing Technology Consultancy, Design and Development of Desktop, Web and Mobile applications using various tools and softwares. Sign-up for the Email for daily updates. Google+ Profile.